My review of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus is now available at LARB.

A taste:

In the 1991 second volume of his classic graphic novel Maus, published five years after the first, Art Spiegelman briefly — and dramatically — drops the conceit for which his book is so famous. For seven pages, instead of depicting himself as a humanoid mouse, he draws himself as a human being wearing a mouse mask. When we first meet this new version of Art, he is sitting at his drafting table, balanced atop a pile of dead, emaciated humanoid-mouse bodies, reflecting on the success of the first volume of Maus. In the panels that follow, journalists ask an exasperated Art what Maus means. Merchandisers approach him offering lucrative opportunities to turn his comic book about his father Vladek’s experience surviving a Nazi concentration camp into what Spiegelman has elsewhere called “Holokitsch”: grossly sentimental and commercial appropriations of survivor stories. In response to the trauma of success, Art shrinks down to a child-sized form. “I want … ABSOLUTION,” he whines. “No … No … I want … I want … my MOMMY!” Art visits his therapist, Pavel — another Holocaust survivor, whose own mouse mask bears an eerie resemblance to Vladek’s mouse face (talk about transference!) — and slowly returns to adult size. But not for long.

You can read the rest here. And if you just can’t get enough of my views on MetaMaus, here goes an interview with me and LARB managing editor Evan Kindley discussing my review.

The Los Angeles Review of Books also published my interview with Helen DeWitt (alongside my review and Scott Esposito’s review of Lightning Rods).

My favorite answer that Helen gave?

I read James Wood’s review of White Teeth, in which he introduced the term “hysterical realism,” a long while back: He complained of novels obsessed with information, novels of relentless vivacity with no real understanding of character. It seemed to me that this way of formulating the objection was only possible in ignorance of Edward Tufte’s work on information design. Tufte is a ferocious critic of what he calls “chartjunk” — charts that enliven data for a supposedly nervous reader; chaos and clutter, he argues, are not features of information, they are features of design. To achieve clarity, add detail.

It’s weirdly gratifying to imagine that Don DeLillo’s problem as a writer isn’t that he’s a novelist of information, as Wood would have it, but that he’s a novelist of chartjunk.

Read the whole interview here.

In their infinite wisdom, the Los Angeles Review of Books published my review of Helen DeWitt’s very funny second novel, Lightning Rods.

Helen DeWitt’s first novel, The Last Samurai, was published in 2000 to almost universally rapturous praise. It sold a hundred thousand copies in English. If literary publishing were a rational enterprise, even along narrowly capitalistic lines, DeWitt would have no trouble finding a permanent home at a major house. After all, whatever else we might say about her excellence as a writer, DeWitt sells.

But publishing is far from rational, and so we have had to wait eleven years for her second novel, Lightning Rods. Adding to the absurdity of this long wait, DeWitt completed a draft of this book in 1999, before she even sold The Last Samurai, but was unable to publish it until it was released from its contract with Miramax Books, which had the option to publish it, chose not to, and yet would not allow the book to be released elsewhere.

You can read the rest here.

The Believer published my review of Andrew Altschul’s Deus Ex Machina — or rather the character of Sarah Palin as she is depicted in that novel — in September.

Andrew Altschul’s second novel, Deus Ex Machina, tells the story of The Deserted, a reality-television program limping into its thirteenth season with low ratings and a deadened sense of mission. This season’s contestants—a gay hairdresser, an inner-city gangbanger, an ex-marine, and a dentist who seems completely uninterested in being on television, among other self-conscious walking clichés—vie to beat their fellow castaways in brutal contests of strength and endurance. It’s a dark fable about the depravities of contemporary life and the grotesque falsifications that undergird our reality-television culture, a familiar critique for fans of the postmodern metafictional tradition.

But near the middle of the novel, something sort of odd—something electrifying—happens: in a desperate ploy to revive viewer interest, network execs book Sarah Palin as a guest star. During the fourth week of the season, the Deserted traverse a frozen wasteland to beseech Palin for wisdom and guidance. Appearing as The High Priestess of Xim, Palin offers it: “You can’t spend your life crying over spilt milk… being a whiner. What’s already happened is the past, and only if people aren’t interested in progressing themselves, people who like to kind of complain and whine and put other people in charge to sit there worrying.”

Read the rest here!

Also, it’s not posted online, but you can read Altschul’s response letter to my review in the December 2011 issue.

The Los Angeles Review of Books published my review of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King alongside a review by Cornel Bonca.

In the three months since the publication of David Foster Wallace’s third, unfinished novel, The Pale King — an eternity in the world of professional reviews — plenty of opinions have been offered, but no consensus has yet formed about how it relates to the author’s career or aesthetic priorities. The novel, which follows a host of troubled characters that work or have recently arrived at the IRS’s Midwest Regional Examination Center in Peoria, IL, in 1985, remains elusive. Everywhere in these fifty busy chapters, there are ominous signs of an ongoing organizational restructuring of the Service known as the “Spackman Initiative” or sometimes just “the Initiative.” One gets only a vague sense of the contours of the Initiative and the high-level plotting that gave rise to it over the course of The Pale King’s five-hundred-and-forty pages. Despite multiple dialogues about civics and shadowy background plots, what Wallace seems to care most about is describing how his characters survive the mind-numbing boredom of their IRS jobs and telling the varied, often brilliantly funny and inventive stories of how they came to work there in the first place. But what exactly was Wallace attempting to do with these characters — and more generally with this “long thing,” as he described the book to his editor, Michael Pietsch? How would The Pale King, had it been finished, have advanced the plot of Wallace’s career?

You can read the rest here.

(A conversation with Andrew Goldstone originally published on Arcade under the user name “Goldstone and Konstantinou.”)

We’ve both been very interested in the sociology of literature, and we’ve both talked about literary-sociological issues on Arcade before; but there’s nothing like coming to grips with a full-blown literary-sociological study. Herewith, then, our discussion of a recent book by a major sociologist of literature, Wendy Griswold’s Regionalism and the Reading Class (ebook).

Griswold’s thesis is that literary regionalism is an emergent formation, nourished and sustained by the elite stratum of regular readers she calls the “reading class.” Though this elite is seen as (and really is) geographically mobile, even cosmopolitan, its mobility does not, she argues, contribute to the bleaching-out of distinctive local cultures (“place” as opposed to “space”). Instead, regionalism, far from being a residual element of dying local cultures, is thriving in the global age, thanks to highly mobile reading elites. The core of her argument comes in a triad of case studies in literary regionalism. Her third chapter investigates what she calls “cowbirds” in the United States—people who move to a new region only to adapt to their new home by learning about and consuming regional literature. Her fascinating fourth chapter argues that literary regionalism is lacking in contemporary Italy because of the country’s distinctive social history. Chapter 5 compares the effects of state funding on literary regionalism in the U.S. and Norway. The conclusion, passing by way of fascinating anecdotes about the contemporary importance of regional labeling by the Library of Congress, speculates that regionalism will continue to thrive thanks to the cultural prestige of the reading class, even though “reading culture” is vanishing and reading for entertainment is increasingly the province of the “between one-quarter and one-third of the population…in developing countries…perhaps around 15 percent” (167) who make up the reading class.

Reading Class and Reading Culture 

LK and AG, in chorus: We agree on what constitutes the most important part of the book: the description of Norwegian state support for literature! Norway buys 1000 copies of every book a Norwegian author publishes. It provides a $19,000 annual subsidy to every author who is a member of the Authors’ Union. The Association of Bookstores is allowed to have a monopoly on the sale of books—but is prohibited by law from engaging in price competition. It requires, by law, that bookstores keep books in stock for two years regardless of sales. And it exempts books from its very steep sales tax. Not surprisingly, Griswold finds, “Norwegians everywhere read, and they read a lot; Norway has one of the world’s highest reading rates” (137).

LK & AG: Wow. Let’s move there.

LK: My first reaction to the book was that its argument is relatively straightforward but has the virtue of being right. A former sociology major friend of mine complained that sociology reports what you already know, either using really elaborate terminology or a blizzard of data. One counterargument to this complaint would be, yes, that’s exactly what sociology is all about.

AG: Griswold’s concept of the “reading class” is really useful (as already discussed in LK’s earlier post on an article-length version of Griswold’s argument). For me, it represents a first analytic step beyond speculation about the “reading public” and whether it exists. It’s also an antidote to the idealization of the reader in literary studies, which so often assumes that whatever the critic herself sees, “the reader” must see. (But as Anne DeWitt wrote in her post on Victorian reading, modern critical readings can diverge even from the critical readings of another time.) For Griswold, the reading class consists of “those people who read for entertainment constantly,” “modest in size but immense in cultural influence”; it can be characterized in terms of education, economic capital, social capital, demographics, cultural practices (37). The complementary concept is Griswold’s idea of a “reading culture,” a place in which “most people, over and above the demands of their job or schooling, routinely read printed materials for entertainment and information” (164). The practice of decrying the decline of reading misses, Griswold shows, that the reading class continues to read ever more. It is reading cultures, she says, which “are rare and becoming rarer” (164).

LK: She also debunks a dystopian view of reading culture—the sort of claim one finds in Gary Shteyngardt’s Super Sad True Love Story, which depicts a near future in which literally no one is reading (except the novel’s protagonist). Griswold shows that a small group of us are reading more than ever before. Most of us are reading far less, of course, which is why the dystopian story can seem plausible. Still, I’m not ready to fully endorse her story about the decline of reading culture. That is, it may well be true, but where’s the data about the early 20th century? Or the 19th century for that matter? Griswold refers to the age of mass reading as an “anomaly” in history, but it’s hard to compare periods without comparable data.

AG: And the explanation is not bulletproof either. Basically the idea is that reading culture declines because reading, as a source of entertainment and information, loses out to other media: radio, film, TV, Internet. But why is it so certain that reading always loses? What guarantees this?

Regionalism?

AG, LK: There’s a strange non-relation between the two pieces of the book, regionalism and the reading class. Her thesis about regionalism depends on the existence of the reading class. But beyond its existence it doesn’t matter to her story about literary regionalism. Her account of the reading class, meanwhile, could very well stand alone—and could have been developed at greater length.

LK: I wanted more from her findings. Griswold shows that literary regionalism exists. She wants to claim that this regionalism is emergent (in Raymond Williams’s sense). But it could just as well be that regionalism is residual. Or, a hypothesis she doesn’t even consider, that regionalism was always and remains dominant.

AG: If anything Griswold is stronger on the residual quality of reading culture, not the emergent quality of regionalism. Have there been qualitative shifts in the status of regionalism over the twentieth century, for example? Some of Griswold’s key examples are murder mysteries with regional settings—an immediately recognizable contemporary genre. Are there early-century equivalents? (On the other hand, I do see the logic of Griswold’s claim for the emergence of regionalism: if a reading class is now again an emergent formation, and regionalism is closely tied to that class, that regionalism will have been shown to be emergent too.)

LK: For me the big takeaways, apart from Norway, are (1) the roles that state institutions can play in developing literature and reading and (2) the concept of reading class. What further research could be done? How about looking at inequality in this connection? Even crude measures, like Gini coefficient vs. book-publication / book-sales per capita.

AG: What about those weird author lists used in chapter 3’s survey of regionalism? Pretty arbitrary:

NEW ENGLAND:

Connecticut: Rose Terry Cooke; Wallace Stevens Maine: R. P. T. Coffin; Sarah Orne Jewett; Edna St. Vincent Millay; Edwin Arlington Robinson; Tim Sample

Massachusetts: Henry Adams; Anne Bradstreet; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Robert B. Parker; Henry David Thoreau

New Hampshire: Alice Brown; Robert Frost; Celia Thaxter

Rhode Island: Avi; A. J. Liebling; H. P. Lovecraft; Roger Williams

Vermont: Robert Newton Peck; Rowland Evans Robinson. (177)

LK: The list of authors in the survey is indeed weird, a mix of high-school canons, middlebrow writers, and bestsellers.

AG: Yet the middlebrow as a concept is missing from this book, whereas it seems like it’s right at the heart of the reading class vs. reading culture question. Because the “middlebrow” designates some kind of general culture that is widely known, whereas “highbrow” is by definition an elite niche. Another kind of further work that builds on Griswold would try to be more exact about the kinds of literature that have special regional audiences. Perhaps it would turn out that canonical vs. non-, high-prestige vs. low-, etc. just don’t matter to regionalism, and these weird lists are fine. But maybe not.

LK: I think the US cowbirds chapter’s claims are not as well supported as the rest of the book. Yes, it debunks the “Globalization Kills Local Culture” thesis—which needed to be killed—but what about the positive part? What, say, does the relatively higher profile of Garrison Keillor to Minnesotans say about regionalism’s changing status?

AG: Right, and the other chapters have a negative thrust too. The Norway chapter really disproves the claim that state patronage is a sufficient condition for regionalism to emerge. Maybe it’s necessary. Griswold isn’t too clear about what would be sufficient.

LK: Maybe (1) state patronage (2) reading class (3) no aspiration to nationwide hegemony in the region in question.

Life After Griswold

AG: So how do we use this book? What does it change about what we do?

LK: Like I said, I think this book can help as a specific intervention in the globalization debate. I was reading Bruce Robbins’s Feeling Global while reading Griswold. Robbins’s book is really good in a lot of ways, but it’s notable how many intellectuals who participate in globalization debates don’t make many reference to empirical evidence or data-driven sociology.

LK: All of this research, even sociology research, is clearly a mix of qualitative and quantitative, but often the literary side of the equation is all qualitative. We need to investigate further how valid our claims are. And we should certainly be supportive of literary scholarship that looks for data, empirical claims, etc.

LK: Actually admitting that we don’t know something is a good thing. I am a great fan of speculative criticism but I think it has its limitations. For example, rather than claim to have an opinion on whether globalization eradicates locality, we could say, “More research needs to be done on that question before we can make a small claim.” Even if we don’t want to be the ones to do the research! Not all of us want to be creating surveys.

AG: Because we could study it and we could try to find out.

AG: What about models of how readers actually use books? I always want that from sociology of reading.

LK: I guess it’s complicated. In the agent-structure debate, for example, Griswold seems to be a structure person. But we have to have that debate in literary studies too. It’s not like we just import findings from sociology, point to our hard-won facts and say to our fellow humanists “Look! Facts!” We should treat sociological methods and results critically—but critical out of respect and from a serious desire to think about the claims being made.

AG: I’m right with you there. But I’d go even further and say we should import not just the findings but the methods. If we ask sociological questions, we should be prepared to give sociological answers (quantitative and qualitative).

AG: Anyway, there’s a lot of further work to be done on either or both sides of the disciplinary divide. I’m particularly keen to know what would happen if we expanded beyond this book’s near-exclusive focus on fiction. A lot of the argument is premised on a kind of absorptive, solitary reading that seems prototypically novelistic. Indeed laments about the death of reading in the age of TV often seem to fixate on the threat to long-attention-span activity. But fifty years ago this cultural battle was fought in different terms. For Practical Critics and New Critics, it was intensity, not extension, that mattered most about reading. And the key genre for intense reading, for defeating “stock responses” and embracing ironic complexity, was lyric. Is there a “poetry-reading class” that has a distinctive trajectory from the reading class in general?

LK: For me, the big open question is about inequality. Also, we need more detailed studies of individual reading practices. Griswold cites a few of these in her discussion of “How People Read” in chapter 2.

AG: I was particularly intrigued by the ethnography of reading she mentions, David Barton and Mary Hamilton’s Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community.

Is Reading Culture Good?

AG: Is there a normative claim in favor of reading culture? Griswold is pretty careful not to make one.

LK: I think we should value reading culture. And if reading culture depends on state support or subsidies or non-state institutional arrangements, we need to think about what that means about the “politics” of literature departments.

AG: On the other hand, as Griswold points out, mass literacy is not the same as reading culture. What if we had just the former? How bad would it be if everyone could read for information and for work, but reading for entertainment became a minority pastime?

LK: It depends on what you want to say about the transferability of reading skills from one domain to another. There is a set of claims of dubious merit that recur. Reading long-form literary texts enable democracy. A reading culture is about more than mere entertaining. I think we should admit that replacing a reading culture centered on detective novels with a television culture centered on CSI won’t have much to do with democracy-promotion. If we’re talking about long-form attention-intensive reading, then there are arguments like Steven Johnson’s that modern media is increasingly sophisticated and requires complex forms of engagement. So Lost might be as good for democracy as Conrad by that theory.

AG: To me the debate sounds like a retread of Q.D. Leavis-style attacks on the fiction enjoyed by the reading public. Before television and the Internet became the villains, it was popular fictional genres that were held to be stultifying, anaesthetizing, inauthentic, bad for you. Yet 1920s Britain is a close as you could possibly get to a full-on “reading culture.” I wonder whether there isn’t, submerged in the argument about entertainment genres, in any medium, an argument about the genres of information and debate: is this really about looking for a viable public sphere in mass-mediated modernity?

AG: Anyway, Griswold keeps her hands off. The funny thing is that sociology books often make policy recommendations, and this book does tell you how to support reading culture. Look at Norway! But that’s not what Griswold says.

LK: The simplest version of the argument would be: I like books, I like reading them. I want other people to read and like them too. If we all agree that reading culture is good, this is what we have to do make it real.

LK: Another possibly useful finding from this book is about the prestige of reading for all, even non-readers.

AG: Even in a non-reading culture. 

LK: The ubiquitous prestige of reading teaches something about where support for investment in reading might come from. Everyone says they support reading and desire reading culture. Fewer people seem to be living up to their hopes and ideals. Which might either be a form of mass hypocrisy or, more likely, a sign of how bad our institutions are at helping us live our desires. Again, Norway will lead us!

LK: The most persuasive argument, I think, is that the preconditions that enable reading culture—leisure time, disposable income, the capacity and space to focus, engage critically, form memories, deliberate—also facilitate political democracy. By that theory, a healthy reading culture is more symptom than cause of political health. And yet the “politics of the literature department” remain more or less the same. We fight for those preconditions.

AG (wearing “Non-tenured Radical” t-shirt): Agreed! As long as the reading class commands its material and symbolic resources, people who are committed to justice should want to see those resources fairly distributed. A fair distribution of the reading class’s forms of capital would probably be the utopian version of reading culture. And we are not being somehow extrinsically “politicized” if we fight for those preconditions: we are intervening in the name of the integrity of what we do.

(Introduction to “The Contemporary Novel” colloquy at Arcade.)

Any colloquy on the contemporary novel faces two immediate challenges.

We must deal first with our adjective. What do we mean by "contemporary"? The primary sense of the word, according to the trusty OED, is "[b]elonging to the same time, age, or period; living, existing, or occurring together in time." This sense brings to mind the calendrical fetish so deeply ingrained in the DNA of literary study. We have long presumed that synchrony conceals a cultural logic–an episteme, a Zeitgeist, a generational affiliation, whatever collective term we wish to employ to describe a moment–in need of analysis or exposure by the astute critic. Everything is connected, many of us imagine, and our job is to show just how.

Our faith in the significance of synchrony, in the sanctified integrity of the period, links up to the OED’s fourth sense of "contemporary": "Modern; of or characteristic of the present period; esp. up-to-date, ultra-modern; spec. designating art of a markedly avant-garde quality, or furniture, building, decoration, etc., having modern characteristics." After all, if each period has a unique character, what might the character of the present be? When did our period begin? How is it changing? Even historical scholarship opposed to histoire événementielle (event-driven history) doesn’t bypass these questions, but merely folds in longer durations of time into the "moment" of the modern. From the perspective of the long durée, after all, might not authors such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf seem contemporary with Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo?

The second challenge, the challenge of our noun, is both simpler and more vexing. The term "novel" already betrays a relationship to time, such that the adjective might seem redundant. In a sense, inasmuch as they have since their eighteenth-century rise always advertised their newness, all novels are contemporary novels, at least with the moment in which they are written. Without delving here into novel theory–this is the job of our bloggers–we might begin questioning the noun from another perspective, the perspective of genre. After all, what is a novel? And whatever it is, isn’t the contemporary moment defined by its failure, exhaustion, waning, or death? Don’t newer technologies, media, and genres more effectively give us a taste of the Zeitgeist than the stale conventions of realism and metafiction? In an era when, it seems, television, the graphic novel, and nonfiction have stolen the novel’s proverbial thunder, who wants to give Jonathan Franzen the time of day?

That we don’t have good answers to these questions, or at least answers that form anything resembling a critical consensus, speaks to the vital need for this colloquy. My hope is that Arcade will evolve into an important, if admittedly informal, zone where we question the key terms of this multifaceted field, work to form a consensus or at least understand our differences, and organize the early stages of diverse research programmes that will in time find their way into our scholarship and public writing.

—Lee Konstantinou, August 2011

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

Mark Bauerlein–author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) and Literary Theory: An Autopsy–recently released a widely discussed study called "Literary Research: Cost and Impacts" for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. This short study concludes that the impact of literary scholarship "does not justify the labor that went into their making," and that "[a] university’s resources and human capital is thereby squandered as highly-trained and intelligent professionals toil over projects that have little consequence."

* 

Before looking at the substance of Bauerlein’s claims, a word on the CCAP, the "independent, nonprofit research center" that published this study. The CCAP defines its mission this way:

We define our mission rather broadly. “Affordability” means not only rising tuition and other costs to the consumer of education services, but more broadly the burden that colleges impose on society. “Productivity” refers not only to the costs and resources needed to educate students and perform research, but also to the measurement and quality of educational outcomes. CCAP is concerned about finding new ways to do things better–to improve affordability and productivity. In particular, we are interested assessing how the use of the forces of the market could make higher education more affordable and qualitatively better.

Very openly, the CCAP regards "affordability" and "productivity" in broadly libertarian terms. On November 18, 2011, the CCAP co-hosted a conference with the Cato Institute called "Squeezing the Tower: Are We Getting All We Can From Higher Education?" It seems fair to me to imagine that Bauerlein’s report was gratefully added to the program of this conference in the hope of bolstering arguments meant to convince University administrators–and, in the case of public schools, state legislatures–that their schools are unproductive, in need of the loving and gentle invisible hand of the free market to correct the unproductiveness that–no surprise here–Bauerlein argues is endemic to literary scholarship. By "the burden that colleges impose on society" it is not hard to imagine that what the CCAP has in mind is the burden that publically financed colleges–or even college educations financed by government grants or loans–impose on taxpayers who might more fruitfully pump their money into hedgefunds or private charities. It has lately become popular to claim that there is a "bubble" in higher education, by which free-market-lovers usually mean that a higher education is only worthwhile to the degree that it contributes to getting economically remunerative post-college jobs. What’s the point of getting a low-interest government loan to educate yourself if your fate–determined by the iron laws of economics!–is to be little more than a barista? 

* 

Given this provenance, it is unsurprising that there are serious problems with this report, which I will address below, but despite the uses to which the CCAP might want to put Bauerlein’s study there are also serious issues that it raises, albeit in a highly unsystematic way. The centrally important question this study asks — but fails to answer — can be put in the form of a riddle: When is hyperproductivity unproductive?

Studying the scholarly output of literature departments across a range of schools (the University of Georgia, SUNY-Buffalo, the University of Vermont, and the University of Illinois), Baulerlein finds that literary scholars are highly productive, even after they gain tenure, crafting high quality scholarship and criticism across the span of their careers. This is a highly inconvenient finding, of course, if you are a school administrator whose goal is to find arguments for the abolition of tenure–and for the increased casualization and adjunctification of humanities faculty. Such arguments typically rely on the myth that the University literature department is crammed with tenured radicals who do nothing but sit on their collectivized asses all day. That the tenure system is ultimately what is at stake in this debate should not be in doubt. In another article, "Is Tenure Doomed?," written three years before he released his CCAP study, Bauerlein concludes:

To fend off adjunctization, then, individuals and professional organizations need to craft and defend a different model. They need to develop employment schemes less absolute but still protective and meritocratic. One possibility might be to grant teachers some form of tenure, but on the basis of teaching duties, not research expertise. That is, they would be hired to handle undergraduate student demands more than to fulfill a disciplinary field. So, as the burdens shift in the undergraduate student body–for instance, fewer students in Romance languages, more in freshman composition–professors would shift as well, in this case, with Romance language professors reducing their language courses and assuming freshman comp duties (after some re-training). That would require, of course, that professors lighten their research identities and raise their teaching profiles–a welcome adjustment in all humanities and "softer" social science fields.

To create a convincing case for an emphasis on teaching over research, a change of emphasis that eviserates the reason for having tenure in the first place–the whole point of tenure isn’t job security per se, but the securing of academic freedom from the market and the state–Bauerlein must devise some other way of discovering unproductivity in this curious situation of–if anything–hyperproductivity. What he points to, via a methodology of citation-counting that many have criticized but which for this blog post I am happy enough to accept, is that though scholars are highly productive their research has very little "impact" or an impact that should not be regarded as "significant." On average, articles and books receive very little attention in the years immediately following their publication. What is the justification for paying scholars so much money, Bauerlein asks, if what they write receives so little attention from other scholars in their own field? It’s a good question.

Bauerlein concludes, very much in keeping with his already long-established preference, that there isn’t a justification. Institutions of higher learning should reduce the demand for scholarly production in favor of service and teaching. Whether or not the individual scholar finds her research personally enriching, contemporary literary scholarship is a waste of valuable time when viewed from a systemic perspective. At times, Baulerlein even tries to suggest that "[c]ampus leaders may, in fact, find a grateful constitutency among the faculty" when they change the balance of teaching, service, and research!

The problem with this argument should hopefully be apparent: the norms guiding Bauerlein’s study, especially around the definition of "impact," are so thinly defended as to be almost meaningless. What is the purpose of scholarship? Why should citations count more than, dare we say it, truth-value? What is the mission of a University if not to produce excellent scholarship? This is, it must be emphasized, different from the problem of overproduction in particular subfields. The relative lack of impact of every subsequent essay on Dickinson–compared to every essay on David Foster Wallace–is a separate question from the norms that should systematically guide the balance of scholarship, teaching, and service. Moreover, without comparative data, it’s hard to know what sort of comparative impact English departments are having. How do they compare to mathematics departments? Classics departments? If a physicist devises a successful unification of gravity and the other forces that is only legible to three other theoretical physicists in the world–and is therefore infrequently cited–was the money that supported that research a waste of University resources?

If the purpose of the University is to produce knowledge–and by Bauerlein’s account the English department is successful at producing knowledge–then the cost of producing knowledge is whatever it costs to produce. If anything, the cost of producing literary monographs and articles is neither more nor less, in our current system of higher education, than the market rate of hiring faculty to do the work that is expected of them. (And given that literary study doesn’t require particle accelerators, the costs are actually comparatively pretty low, though one shouldn’t doubt that the Department of Defense would quickly step up should the new quantitative turn in literary study require a couple billion dollars in taxpayer support.) It is, moreover, the conditions of the market that propel an arms-race-like escalation of demands on scholarly productivity. To the degree that universities arrive at collective agreements that modify disciplinary norms–whether in literature departments or any department–they are making the environment within which literary scholarship is produced less market-like. Making conditions less market-like might be a good thing, if the de-escalation of scholarly hyperproductivity weren’t also taken as an excuse to dismantle the already fraying system of tenure. The negative response to Bauerlein’s study is grounded, I suspect, in the fear that it was commissioned and will be used as an excuse to increasingly adjunctify the humanities. Far from being an alternative to adjunctification, an emphasis on teaching and service often facilitates its acceleration.

What Baulerlein doesn’t really consider is the possibility that a less manically competitive set of tenure requirements might be devised as a way of allowing, on the one hand, more time to be devoted to each essay or book and as a way of facilitating, on the other hand, a raw increase in the number of citations, if that’s his preferred metric of impact (rather than truth-value). After all, if fewer essays and books were published each year on Dickinson relative to the total number of Dickinson scholars, might it not be increasingly likely that each of those essays and books would get a higher number of citations? That that scholarship might even be widely read? The change I am suggesting would entail not the substitution of teaching in place of scholarship–but rather a new emphasis on the article or essay as the coin of the disciplinary realm. Of course, no such academic arms control agreement is likely to be adopted unless the broader trend of adjunctification is addressed.

This process of adjunctification, which is often misunderstood as an "overproduction" of Ph.D.s, is the ground upon which the "insignificant" scholarship we are asked to produce currently stands. It is the ground that must change if we hope to make more of an impact on our respective fields.

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called "Why We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading," Alan Jacobs argues that "’deep attention’ reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit." The inevitable minority status of deep reading "has been obscured in the past half-century, especially in the United States, by the dramatic increase in the percentage of the population attending college, and by the idea […] that modern literature in vernacular languages should be taught at the university level."

Mass higher education has artificially propped up reading, in Jacobs’s view, leading many to falsely believe that engaged, long-form reading is something everyone should love. Drawing on a 2005 sociological survey of reading practices, which I discuss at greater length below, Jacobs calls the population of deep readers "the reading class." Our "anxiety about American reading habits, and those in other developed nations to a lesser degree," he concludes, "arises from frustration at not being able to sustain a permanent expansion of ‘the reading class’ beyond what may be its natural limits."

In fact, "the idea that many teachers hold today, that one of the purposes of education is to teach students to love reading–or at least to appreciate and enjoy whole books–is largely alien to the history of education." We are deceiving ourselves if we think we can teach students to love reading or for that matter to read more deeply than they would "naturally" do.

Because focusing on print is a cognitively alien (and alienating) activity for children, because an appreciation for long-form reading must be, in the words of Steven Pinker, "bolted on" the student, and because that bolting-on process is so very "painstaking," we should, in Jacobs’s view, "extricate reading from academic expectations." Instead of teaching "[s]low and patient reading[…]"–a pursuit which "properly belongs to our leisure hours"–we would do well to teach high schoolers and undergraduates how to "skim[…] well, and read[…] carefully for information in order to upload content."

In short, mass literary culture is an artificial construction produced in part by an unnatural and inauthentic university system. The real or authentic form of reading happens–definitionally–outside academia, among autodidacts and amateurs. Though couched in a breezy and easygoing tone, Jacobs is making an extraordinarily destructive argument, not only from the perspective of someone who is invested in the flourishing of the academy but also from the perspective of someone who wants to enlarge literary culture. I count myself among both groups.

In an era where universities are seeking new ways to justify slashing and burning the humanities, Jacobs provides fresh ammunition to administrators. Real reading can’t, apparently by definition, happen in the classroom. Real reading happens in the marketplace, among individuals or small private groups of enthusiasts. Why fund literature departments if they, at best, have no effect on literary appreciation or at worst actively inculcate shame and fear in potential readers by making reading a pill?¹

To support his arguments, Jacobs cites a great 2005 Annual Review of Sociology article, "Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century," by Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright. In this review of recent approaches to the sociology of reading–and investigations of multiple literacies–Griswold, McDonnell, and Wright show that reading is always the product of collective determinants and institutional mediation, and suggest that reading might indeed become a minority taste in the future.

Contra Jacobs’s claims, however, their discussion of the development of a "reading class" has nothing to do with the "natural" boundaries of the reading public, but is rather about the way different institutional arrangements lead to different reading levels and practices.

They do argue that "historically the era of mass reading, which lasted from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century in northwestern Europe and North America, was the anomaly" and that "[w]e are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class."

But far from being the practice of a tribe of "natural readers," as Jacobs wants to argue, reading always happens in terms of a "social base." Whether a majority or a minority taste, there is little that is "natural" or "unnatural" about what they describe. Formal education is "the main determinant of literary proficiency," but even the isolated reader (or the autodidact Jacobs celebrates) is enmeshed in large and complex social systems of literary framing and pre-digested interpretation. Whatever their motivations or virtues, the self-perpetuating minority of the "reading class" relies as much on this "social base" as mass readers do. The anomalous nature of mass reading is not an argument against it–or for it. It is merely a social fact.

What this means is that Jacobs misunderstands the real implications of his own claims. From a social fact (the unnaturalness of mass long-form reading) he derives what seem to me to be non-sequitur conclusion (the desirability of this decline). As I have argued in a previous post, the unsuitability of our biology to a certain practice is not an argument against that practice. Likewise, the universality of a biological aspect of the human organism is no argument for it. The artificiality, difficulty, and education-dependence of deep reading is not an argument against the humanities but could well be an argument for the humanities. After all, if we value long-form reading–and long-form reading requires intensive training to perform well–we had best invest in institutions whose goal is the inculcation of this skill.

Finally, in a literary-historical register, Jacobs’s arguments seem to call for the development of a research program that could empirically elaborate upon the conclusions of Griswold, McDonnell, and Wright. If, as I suspect, the demand for literature is anything but "natural," but is itself produced institutionally, literary scholars should dedicate themselves to investigating the historical, social, political, and economic production of demand. Post-WWII U.S. literature would be an especially ripe case study for anyone interested in this research program, not only because the institutional forces producing demand are so well documented but because for many of us these forces have had very powerful personal effects on who we are and our relationship to literary art.

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Notes

1. Some might argue that literature departments ought to be justified without referring to their salubrious effects on reading habits and practices. This is something like Stanley Fish’s argument on the uselessness of the humanities. I won’t address this argument here, but I should say that it’s problematic and probably leaves the humanities on even weaker footing, even if only in the purely cynical terms of the administrative fight to secure funding.